Microfluidics

Fluids behave differently when channels shrink to the size of a human hair: viscosity dominates over inertia, surface effects and electric double layers start steering the flow, and intuition built from macroscale pipes stops working. The course builds the physics and modeling tools to handle that regime — Stokes flow, electrokinetics, capillarity, two-phase transport — and asks you to apply them through homework sets, simulations of phenomena like electro-osmosis and Joule heating, and a term project that culminates in a presentation. It is a graduate elective that assumes solid fluid mechanics and transport background, and it is the entry point into lab-on-a-chip and BioMEMS research, where the same equations underpin diagnostic chips, droplet assays, and particle-sorting devices.